Campers are familiar with the “smoke in your eyes” phenomenon in which, no matter where they move around the fire, smoke seems to follow them. Campers are also familiar with difficulty in lighting and maintaining a campfire, for example when using substandard wood or in poor weather conditions. Despite these drawbacks, the campfire and its flames are always the center of attention, camaraderie, entertainment and warmth during campouts and other outdoor activities.
Tubular draft-enhancing devices for starting or improving the efficiency of outdoor wood fires and charcoal grills are known. Examples include those shown in U.S. Pat. Nos. 1,189,568 to Hempy (tapered tubular stump burner or “chimney” that surrounds and encloses a stump, with the ground dug away to permit a draft underneath); 1,348,427 to Landers (open-bottomed box stove for use inside a tent over a campfire, with a tapered smokestack); 1,934,339 to Winberg (tapered tubular orchard heater with an above-ground grate to contain a charcoal or similar solid fuel fire); 3,112,716 to Knight (tapered tubular fire starter for outside grills with removable charcoal supporting grate rods to selectively dump ignited charcoal down into the grill); 3,192,918 to Ridgway (removable, coal-enclosing circular flange with a central chimney); 4,311,130 to Noose (fire starter with a circular skirt and tapered central chimney, the skirt overlying the fuel to be ignited); 5,002,037 to Armstrong et al. (portable tapered campfire smokestack with a larger open bottom end supported above and “accommodating” a campfire of reasonable size within its diameter); 5,074,279 to Sainsbury (an open-bottomed and open-topped grill-starter, with a circular band of metal confining the solid fuel); 5,357,940 to Kalenian (grill afterburner in the form of a tubular smokestack addition spaced to one side of the grill to draw the combustion products away from the grill interior); 5,682,872 to Whitted (tubular camping furnace that surrounds the burning fuel and directs smoke upward); and 5,833,353 to Smith (tapered campfire chimney that is itself combustible, with a raised internal updraft chamber for inserting fire starting materials that will ignite a more-rapidly consumed portion of the chimney at a point above the ground, with the flames contained inside the chimney's shell).
With the exceptions of the Armstrong et al and Whitted devices, none of the above appears to be suited for use with open, ground-based campfires of decent size, around which groups of campers like to congregate in the evening.
Armstrong et al's device, although designed for campfires, would obscure a significant portion of the fire underneath and would limit the size of the fire that it accommodates. Whitted's device appears to be intended for efficient cooking with a ground-based wood fire, but not for visually enjoying the flames of an open campfire, as it encloses the fire with a metal wall.